engrossed
by the design he was making, he patted the priest's shaven crown with
his hand, saying, Oter tems, oter tems, and then resumed his pencil with
great earnestness. The ecclesiastic, perceiving that the stranger did
not comprehend his meaning, pulled him by the sleeve, and explained
himself in the Latin tongue: upon which Pallet, provoked at his
intrusion, cursed him aloud for an impudent beggarly son of a w--, and,
taking out a shilling, flung it upon the pavement, with manifest signs
of indignation.

Some of the common people, enraged to see their religion contemned, and
their priests insulted at the very altar, rose from their seats, and,
surrounding the astonished painter, one of the number snatched his book
from his hand, and tore it into a thousand pieces. Frightened as he was,
he could not help crying "Fire and fagots! all my favourite ideas are
gone to wreck!" and was in danger of being very roughly handled by the
crowd, had not Peregrine stepped in, and assured them, that he was a
poor unhappy gentleman, who laboured under a transport of the brain.
Those who understood the French language communicated this information
to the rest, so that he escaped without any other chastisement than
being obliged to retire. And as they could not see the famous Descent
from the Cross till after the service was finished, they were conducted
by their domestic to the house of a painter, where they found a
beggar standing for his picture, and the artist actually employed in
representing a huge louse that crawled upon his shoulder. Pallet was
wonderfully pleased with this circumstance, which he said was altogether
a new thought, and an excellent hint, of which he would make his
advantage: and, in the course of his survey of this Fleming's
performances, perceiving a piece in which two flies were engaged upon
the carcass of a dog half devoured, he ran to his brother brush, and
swore he was worthy of being a fellow-citizen of the immortal Rubens.
He then lamented, with many expressions of grief and resentment, that
he had lost his commonplace book, in which he had preserved a thousand
conceptions of the same sort, formed by the accidental objects of
his senses and imagination; and took an opportunity of telling his
fellow-travellers, that in execution he had equalled, if not
excelled, the two ancient painters who had vied with each other in the
representation of a curtain and a bunch of grapes; for he had exhibited
the image